


Modern Chemistry

by Pizza_Of_My_Eye



Series: Point / Counterpoint [1]
Category: Resident Evil - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol, Daddy Issues, F/M, Friendship, Self-Medication, kinda angsty, more than friends?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:48:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24555691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pizza_Of_My_Eye/pseuds/Pizza_Of_My_Eye
Summary: Life sucks so you drag your best friend to a bar and attempt to drink your problems away.Probably not the smartest idea you've ever had, but you've had worse nights.
Relationships: Leon S. Kennedy/Reader
Series: Point / Counterpoint [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1774804
Comments: 4
Kudos: 38





	Modern Chemistry

You relished the feeling of the alcohol rushing to your head as you stared into your now empty glass. It was smudged with your lipstick and fingerprints and the swirling patterns of each captured your drunken attention, the bar and your best friend’s voice melting into background noise as you zoned out completely. 

Three drinks in and you were so close to achieving your goal of blissful inebriation. 

“Y/N!” 

You jumped, the volume of his voice calling out your name startling you out of your stupor. Judging by the annoyed furrow in his brow and the sharp clench in his jaw, it wasn’t Leon’s first attempt to get your attention. You closed your eyes and rolled your shoulders, trying and failing to nonchalantly force the bubbling pit of anxiety back down your throat. 

_God, you needed another drink._

You forced a smile and focused your increasingly blurry eyes on the man beside you. Even after five years of friendship, it was still surreal sometimes, seeing him outside of work and very nearly blending in with regular civilian life. To the untrained eye, he pulled it off perfectly, but you could tell by the way he sat - spine just a little too straight, feet planted a little too solidly, stool angled just right to keep the bar’s exits in clear view. 

He had seen too much in his relatively short life to ever be truly relaxed in public again.

“You don’t have to shout; I’m right here,” you admonished, plucking the glass from his fingers and knocking back the remainder of his whiskey. You winced as the warm liquid burned on the way down. 

“Are you?” he sniffed, clearly unconvinced, and flagged down the bartender for another round. 

You shrugged, a little inelegantly from the three vodka cranberries you’d already killed that night, and swayed a little as you reached for the fourth when your fresh drinks were slid across the bar. Leon grabbed them both first and held them to his chest as he frowned at you again, his blue eyes narrowed in the low light.

You laughed, misreading his intentions completely, and the sound was harsh and overly loud as most drunken laughs tended to be. “Didn’t think mixed drinks were your thing, Leon.”

Leon’s lip twitched like he was fighting a smile, or maybe a sneer, but otherwise didn’t respond. After a moment, you whined impatiently, all your dignity pretty much checked out for the night at that point. You were about to make grabby hands for your drink when a sudden wave of dizziness washed over you, causing you to need to grab the bar for support. “Give it, Kennedy.”

“Not sure that’s a good idea.” The words sounded off, almost forced, like he was fighting his own teeth to get them out. “Why don’t switch to water for a while, sweetheart?”

“Jesus, what are you my dad all of a sudden?” You snorted. It was a throw away line, a joke so completely lacking in self awareness that it would have made your skin crawl had you been sober. 

Leon licked his lips and leaned forward, crowding you so close you could smell his shampoo. “Dunno, you drinking to mask your fear of me too?”

You shouldn’t have been so shocked that he called you on it, because of course he did. He was one of the few people in the world with the security clearance to even know about your father, but, unsurprisingly, binge drinking to repress your rampant daddy issues also came with the side effect of being slow on the uptake. Was it really too much to ask of your friend to let you drink yourself into oblivion and ignore reality in peace?

The alcohol in your blood was enough to swing the irrational pendulum of your mood from shock to fury in record time.

Thankfully, the music was loud enough in the bar to cover the sharp crack of you slapping him hard across the face, a move you would come to regret by morning, but one that the rage burning hot through your veins had demanded in the moment. Whether or not he deserved to be on the receiving end of that rage wasn’t the point, not that you were in any sort of condition for nuanced introspection. The point was you were angry and scared and had finally been pushed too far. 

Leon straightened on his stool, mouth agape and eyebrows up to his hairline. He hadn’t been expecting that. You had never hit him before, and it wasn’t like he hadn’t given you plenty of reasons to over the years. Hell, he had spent nearly the first full year of your acquaintance obnoxiously and endlessly trying to get you to sleep with him. He wanted to deck himself just thinking about it. 

He sighed and turned to place the drinks back down on the bar, quickly scanning the room to check that nobody had witnessed your little scene. When he turned back around, he caught your arm raised to strike him again and pulled, knocking you off balance so that you had to hold onto his shoulder to stay on your stool. 

“Fuck you,” you seethed too loud, struggling to snatch your arm free. Leon’s free hand shot out to your hip, countering your weight to prevent you from falling since you seemed alarmingly unconcerned with the way your actions were making your stool wobble. 

“Oh so that’s _not_ what you’re doing here then? Will ya quit trying to hit me, _goddamnit_ , people are staring.”

“ _Fuck. You_.”

“Fine, I’ll just leave then. Good luck getting your belligerent ass home yourself.” He stood, but your hand on his shoulder latched onto his jacket lapel and you were pulled forward onto your feet. It could have been the abrupt movement or the new fear of him actually abandoning you in a dive bar or just another stupid drunken mood swing, but you could feel the rage start to drain from your body along with any energy left to keep yourself upright. Instinctively, Leon caught you against his body before you could crumple to the bar’s dirty floor like a stringless marionette.

You both stood there, pressed together and silent for a while. Almost an entire verse of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin” came and went over the speakers, and Leon started to worry that you might have fucking passed out on him until you heaved a deep breath and finally spoke. 

“Leon…” you muttered, your face smushed against his chest. 

He sighed again, his breath puffing out against your hair and sending a pleasant tingle down your spine. “What?” he asked, not unkindly. 

“Don’t - _please_ don’t leave me?” You shifted in his arms, winding your own around his waist and squeezing, either for reassurance or in an attempt to adhere yourself to him like a barnacle thus making leaving you impossible. 

“You gonna hit me again?”

You shook your head and sniffed. “‘M sorry. Shouldn’t have done that.”

“Well, alright,” Leon replied and took his seat again, arms spread as if to say the floor was all yours. 

You heaved yourself back up on your stool, still a little wobbly, but you waved off Leon’s move to help you. “But you shouldn’t have said _that_. It was fucking out of line and you know it.”

And there it was, the end of his rope. With how frustratingly evasive and cryptic you had been all night, he was surprised that he’d been able to make it as far as he did. You had called _him_ to talk, not the other way around, and getting anything more than a despondent “I’m fine” out of you so far had been physically painful. Leon fought the urge to throw up his arms and scream at one of his few friends. 

“What the hell do you want from me, huh? We’ve been sitting here for _hours_ now on a fucking Tuesday night and you have yet to even allude to what’s bothering you. So, let me help you out and save the two of us some time, hmm? Your old man’s getting paroled and you’re scared.” 

Leon’s threshold for being jerked around was normally pretty impressive - one didn’t get as far as he did in the DSO without willingly and exuberantly jumping through some pretty ridiculous hoops. He’d become an expert at playing the long game. 

But his patience with you was always shockingly limited, despite his genuine affection towards you. Maybe it was because he knew you so well and expected more. Or maybe you were just the only person he actually let get under his skin and as such had a more direct line to his nerves. Leon really didn’t like to dwell on it. 

The blood drained from your face, your mouth suddenly full of spit. You didn’t know if you were about to pass out or vomit or _both_ as reality crashed back onto you with a vengeance. “How-” you croaked. “How do you even know that?”

“I keep an eye on you. Bad habit, I know, but I’ve been doing it for so long now that I can’t seem to help it.” His lips twitched into the barest approximation of a smile and you just blinked at him, stunned. 

“Jesus, Leon, I don’t know whether to be touched or to slap you again. You keep an eye - do I even want to know what that means?”

“I don’t know, when you first told me about your father I pulled his file at the DSO’s office. The shit he did, what he put you through -” he paused, taking a moment to polish off the rest of his whiskey. “I didn’t - I couldn’t let anything like that happen to you ever again. In fact, that reminds me, I called in a favor with the DA’s office and had them draw up some papers for you to sign, restraining order and the like. I’ll have them sent to your office when they’re ready.”

You had forgotten how far up the ladder Leon had climbed. Mr. Right Hand of the President, having favors to cash in from the District Attorney. He’d come a long way from the sarcastic, reckless, young agent you used to bandage up after missions. 

“I don’t… _Leon -”_

“Unless, do you want your own lawyer to handle things? Though with the way that clown bungled the parole hearing, I wouldn’t trust him with my dry clean- hey!”

He was cut off by you all but launching yourself off your stool and into his arms again. He caught you as you whispered, “I can’t believe you did all that…”

Leon let out a surprised, uncomfortable chuckle and pulled you more securely onto his lap. “Yeah, well you know me. Big fan of contingency plans. Hey, c’mon are you _crying?_ Gorgeous, don’t - you don’t have to be scared, okay? I swear to you, if he comes near you, if he even thinks about trying to find you - he’s a dead man.”

It was said with the same sort of nonchalant certainty one usually reserved for low stakes, banal declarations like “it’s going to rain later” or “we should get Thai food for dinner” not promises of violence. A chill went down your spine as you were reminded of the fact that, for Leon Kennedy at least, being a thoughtful, caring person and being a killer weren’t mutually exclusive. It came with the territory of being an agent. 

But what did it say about you that the first feeling at the thought of your own father dead at the hands of your closest friend wasn’t horror or revulsion, but _gratitude_?

“Thank you,” you murmured into his neck, struggling to compose yourself. 

Leon shrugged, as best he could with his arms full of a weepy woman, and pressed a kiss to your temple. “I got your back, you know that. Now, can we be done with this crying shit please? You’re making the entire bar uncomfortable here.”

You nodded and took a deep breath, letting his expensive cologne and warm touch sooth you. It was remarkable how safe Leon made you feel after the tormenting trip down memory lane that had been your life since it was announced that the government was willing to support your father’s appeal for parole in exchange for information on his old boss. You had been so sure that you could do it alone and not let _him_ get to you. But seeing that man again at the hearing, having to give another statement outlining the years of abuse and horror you and mother had suffered, only for it all to mean absolutely _nothing_. To have to see him walk free again...

It turned you right back into that terrified, weak little girl that you had fought so hard to put behind you. But being in Leon’s arms, knowing that you had his support, helped. Made you feel less alone and vulnerable. For the first time in weeks, you felt yourself actually start to relax as you finally let someone else shoulder a little bit of this burden that had been breaking you down. 

“That’s my girl. We good now or are you going to continue using my favorite jacket as a snot rag?”

You let out a watery laugh and pinched Leon’s side, making him jump. “Asshole,” you muttered, hiding a genuine smile into his chest. 

Leon laughed, smoothing the hair back from your face and titling your chin up until your eyes met his. “Let’s get you home, kid.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> I'm planning a little interconnected, non-linear series here with a Friends-to-Lovers theme if you're interested <3


End file.
